Merovingian art

Merovingian art, visual arts produced under the Merovingian kings of the 5th to the 8th century ad, who consolidated power and brought Christianity to the Frankish kingdom (modern France and the Rhineland) after the fall of the Roman Empire in Gaul and laid the political and artistic foundation for the Carolingian Empire that followed. Merovingian art is characterized by a mixture of the Roman classical style with native Germanic-Frankish artistic traditions, which favoured abstraction and geometric patterning. From the end of the 5th century the Germanic style gradually dominated. The human figure was rarely attempted; artists were concerned primarily with the surface design and developed a rich decorative vocabulary.

The Merovingians left little, because their art consisted mainly of small-scale metalwork (jewelry and ecclesiastical objects) that survives only from grave finds and written descriptions. Stone and marble sculpture was produced infrequently, and Merovingian architecture was largely impermanent. Several important Merovingian manuscripts survive, however, such as the 8th-century Gellone Sacramentary (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris). Like Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts, they display a limited range of bright colours, primarily red, green, and yellow. Animal motifs are used imaginatively: sometimes the letters are constructed of fish and birds. The Merovingians’ artistic accomplishments were comparatively modest, but their art was an original and vital blending of barbarian and Mediterranean traditions, which continued to exert influence long after the end of the Merovingian dynasty.

Detail showing the use of rubrication from the Gellone Sacramentary, 8th century (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. lat. 12048, fol. 40)Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris